People sometimes ask me where the name Ninoa comes from. The answer is simple: my mother's name is Nino. Ninoa is for her.
I grew up with psoriasis in Georgia. When I was a child, the resources just weren't there — not the dermatology, not the access to real medication. The doctors gave me antihistamines and creams, but there was no biologic treatment, no real treatment plan. Just a tube and "try this."
So the psoriasis built up. I had extremely thick layers of skin, and I would scratch myself until I bled. That is a very hard thing for a young child to live inside of, and harder still when no one around you knows how to help.
What you get instead is misinformation, and sometimes cruelty dressed up as help. Strangers would promise me, "I make a cream from my ancestors' recipe that will heal you." I remember a woman suggesting I shave my head and wear a beautiful wig. It was horrible. Really horrible.
And the basic things that actually matter, no one told me. No one told me the weather was a trigger — that you have to adjust your treatment in dry, cold weather versus humidity. Nothing about sun, or vitamin D. None of it. You're left to find out the hard way, over years.
Through all of it, there was my mother. She did everything — genuinely everything — to help me. We weren't even in the same country: I was in Georgia, and she was in Germany. She paid for every medication and every doctor's visit out of her own pocket, and the medications were not cheap; some were extremely expensive. She carried that, quietly, for years. And not once did she make me feel like a burden.
That is what ninoa.space means to me. It's not just a domain. It's a space to give other people the thing my mother gave me — that safety, that love, that being-cared-for — when the system around you offers none of it.
Ninoa, the app, is everything I wish my mother and I had back then. The knowledge no one handed us — weather, triggers, what to track, how things connect — built into one place, so the next child, or the next adult, doesn't have to start from nothing. So no one has to feel as alone in it as I did.
— Marika